Jami is p2p, it just cuts the middleman. Is it bad concept? I haven’t had the chance to test Jami or Signal, no adoption from my contacts. But, as from a federation and anti centralized services, Jami should be the better alternative, right?
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I love Jami, that being said it has one massive problem. In order for it to be usable on local networks you need to either port forward the peer to peer port, set up a proxy relay or use the proxy relay that Jami provides. That’s not a big deal to set up or make any of those changes but they are things that need to be done. There is no real warning about it and when you are using mobile it works just fine due to cg-nat so the problem ends up seeming intermittent. Like I said I love Jami but I don’t think it will ever really be a contender for a mainstream chat platform unless they make some pretty big changes to how relays are handled or become more transparent about this particular problem in the setup process.
That being said… Matrix is pretty rad. Like really really rad. Go look at that. It feels a lot more like a federated chat service because it is designed from the ground up to be that. Plus interoperability with clients is cool. Plus if you set up your own server then you can add bridges to sync all of your accounts to use matrix so that you don’t have to force anyone to leave their respective platforms and you can have one unified repository for all of your messaging. Basically means you get to use what you want and other people can use what they want. Go look at it now. Go on git.
Upvote for matrix, it’s more than just a chat app damnit C:
Wait so could i send a message from my matrix to a friend on mastodon
It’s also bring used by drive European entities that are not allowed to use WhatsApp and similar.
I had never heard of it prior to your post. Looks interesting, but it will be hard to get enough people to use it. It took years for most of my contacts to make the move from Whatsapp to Signal.
It took me about a decade to get people I needed to contact just onto WhatsApp from fbmessanger so I could delete Facebook. I’m never going to get people to move to a new messaging app.
I managed to get my immediate family (and my sister’s husband) onto Threema, the extended family is on Whatsapp with zero chance of switching away.
On the other hand, one cousin’s husband can’t stop spamming the group chat with pics of their daughters. Not just “special event, here’s a pic of each at their best” or whatever, but multiple. fotos. daily., sometimes videos too… As a consequence, I’ve permanently muted that whatsapp group and only occasionally take a peek at it.
Oh yeah you gotta mute group chats. Otherwise you’d never get anything done.
Because it’s hard to convince people you know, to abandon what they know and like, and migrate to some other platform they neither perceive as superior, or have their own friends/contacts there.
It’s the problem far older than ICQ…
WhatsApp is pretty good but it has some background usage that I hope someday will make everybody leave it. Because I doubt the Devs will reduce that.
Unless Android/iOS change in a way where that they only allow an app to pass voip calls and messages on background, but nothing else. So you can block these apps entirely on background with the exception of new messages or calls (that shouldn’t cause much background usage).
I’ve been using Telegram since I called it and left all Meta apps (about 4 years ago now). It has been a good experience since. Never heard of Jami but will look it up. =)
I liked Telegram at the start but they started doing crypto (I believe Signal does this too) and when I realize that default chat is not E2E encrypted (has to be secret chat) yet they advertise it as such. I also don’t like that you get greeted by paid features in different parts of the app (picking emoji and stickers). I’m fine with Telegram Premium but I hope they just hide the paid features rather than asking you to pay for the features across the app. Telegram’s UI/UX is way better than Signal and other messaging app which I like. Also, feature-wise they are ahead of the competition (even without premium). The fact that it’s one of the major communication outlet during Ukraine war is another issue plus. Privacy-wise, there are better options out there (Signal, Sessions, Briar, SimpleX (a new one), Element/Matrix). I still use it but not as much.
Using p2p for messaging is really nice for decentralization, but it has the major downside that both communication partners have to be online at the same time to find each other and transmit a message. So you might have to wait for it until both look at their phones at the exact same time. On top there are privacy issues, like being able to see the devices and public IP addresses of other users.
Imo its just not practical and robust enough to be used by millions of non-techy people.
It was pretty rough around the edges last time I used it. Just reinstalled it and it definitely looks polished compared to last time. I haven’t had the chance to really use it with anybody.
